Fossils – Digging Up Dirt

Till 2002 when Fossils hit the market. Asha Audio, a record company operating out of a miniscule office in central Kolkata had earlier established its credentials and made its million by releasing albums of Bengali bands. But Fossils was an unknown proposition, “a risk” like no other, says Mahua Lahiri of the record company. She is sitting in the cramped, airconditioned office where now – three full-length Fossils studio albums wiser – pinups of the band occupy prominent wall space and stacks of the band’s compact discs lie ready to be ferried to music stores across Bengal. “For one, the music was like nothing heard it Bengali,” she goes on. “It was heavier and way darker than anything attempted before, even by other Bengali rock bands. We were worried about the sound of the band, but went ahead.”

His lyrics, Islam emphasises, is an integral part of the Fossils “sound,” where one chases the other to achieve a complete whole. A Metallica buff, Ghosh explains the connection. “It is true that quite often we design the music according to Rupam’s lyrics and basic melody structure.” It so happens that the lyrics mostly demand gloomy overtones in the instrumentation, he adds, a reason why many Fossils songs rely heavily on “a dark approach” to the guitar playing. “I don’t think this sort of sound was tried in Bengali music before Fossils,” claims 33-year-old Bose, a self-professed addict of the kind of panoramic soundscapes unique to Pink Floyd.

About rock music and what they want to talk about, the band has been consistent and they have created their sound with which they are identified, opines musician and filmmaker Anjan Dutt, who got Islam to do playback in his recent film, Chalo Let’s Go and also “shared the platform” with him during protests against the West Bengal government’s handling of the situation in Nandigram and the case of the mysterious death of Rizwanur Rahman, a Kolkata-based Muslim graphic engineer married to a Marwari businessman’s daughter and in whose marital separation and subsequent death officials of Kolkata Police were suspected to be have had a role. “In his age group, Rupam’s an important voice,” adds Dutt.

At the rehearsal, the band members informally refer to one of the songs likely to appear in the next album as “gandu, banchot” – invectives that are part of Kolkata street lingo, but when used in a song, will get the goat of anyone looking for the kind of saccharine romanticism and notions of an ideal world that has been the bedrock of Bengali mainstream music for long. Now Islam wants to use the words to underline his vision of a skewed”“up society. For some time we debate the lineage of the words: ‘banchot‘, we all agree, is a Bengali distortion of the North Indian behenchod; about ‘gandu‘ we are not too sure. Nobody doubts though, that the words, when employed in mass-produced music, will be risqué.

It is not exactly a new situation for Fossils – this Burgess-like introduction of the street, and its attendant frustrations and crudities, to the realms of popular culture. Heavily stimulated by the songwriting and music skills of Alanis Morissette (“My lyrics though are distinctly male chauvinistic”), Kurt Cobain (“I first realised that even yelling serves a purpose; it was honesty pouring out”) and Bengali singer-songwriters, Kabir Suman and Goutam Chatterjee, who fronted Bengal’s first and most iconic original band Mohiner Ghoraguli in the 1970s, quite early in his career Islam realised the need to “stand out.” While the two Bengali singer-songwriters have earlier been instrumental in rattling the sense of status quo dominating middle-class Bengali society, exposing the stains of pretense and mindlessness crisscrossing an otherwise genteel lifestyle, Islam has relied more on metaphors and motifs for expression, he considers.